German transport policy after reunification

Due to the development after the reunification of Germany, the opening of Eastern Europe and the creation of the Single European Market, German transport policy is facing great challenges. We must not only cope with considerable increases in traffic but also with geographically reoriented traffic flows and structural changes. German transport policy will tackle these challenges of the future with the aid of five strategies: (a) the integration of the individual modes of transport; (b) the exploitation of the possibilities offered by modern technology; (c) investments in the construction of new traffic routes and the improvement of existing ones; (d) the consistent utilization of the forces of the market in the transport sector; (e) the protection of the environment and the enhancement of road safety. These strategies are a constituent part of an integrated overall transport concept, which will put Germany in a position to satisfy the evergrowing demands in the field of transport.     

A survey of Hungarian transport policy

Abstract

In its introductory part this article discusses the principles of the transport policy approved in 1968, followed by the reasons behind the advances on this policy approved in 1978.

It then goes on to review the Hungarian transport pattern and organization, including the roles played by the railways, the road transport companies, the state‐owned enterprises as well as cooperatives, urban transport, shipping, air transport, pipelines, and private transport.

In discussing the division of labour (or market sharing) in transport it concludes that passenger transport is increasing slowly, while the proportion of private transport is continuing to rise. A moderate increase is expected in goods transport with a decline in the share of the railways and a rise in that of the other transport branches. This division of labour is being influenced by economic, not administrative, means.

The main target of the advanced transport policy is to shape a transport system which corresponds to socioeconomic requirements. This means that goods transport capacities must be put to more efficient use, which involves improving development, organizational and planning operations. In passenger transport priority must go to public transport while the proportion of private transport must be defined in keeping with demand and economic possibilities.

In the development of the infrastructure and investments, the need to improve energy use and protect the environment must be stressed.

The rest of the article presents the detailed reasoning behind the measures already taken and scheduled to be taken to achieve these main targets.     

Towards a transport policy for the ECOWAS subregion

This paper examines transport policy development in a regional grouping of states whose present transport policies reflect their differing colonial pasts. In addition to locational and physical factors, vested interests in preserving present arrangements, lack of assessment of the repercussions of integration, and lack of political will to surrender to a supra‐national authority decisions which will be binding at the national level are identified as major factors militating against the successful formulation of a common transport policy in West Africa.

It is suggested that, although major changes of policy are often difficult and costly to implement, there is the need to effect institutional changes within the subregion in order to achieve the transport objectives of the ECOWAS treaty.     

客运政策迈向"草根"

1992年,江苏六合县根据邓小平南巡讲话精神制定了<关于进一步放开道路客运市场的通知>,提出要建立"放有度,管有法,活有序"的客运市场,决定对农村客运线路实行招标有偿使用.这一决定的出台,首先遇到了专业客运公司干部职工的反对,认为"管理部门把客运线路卖给了个体户,我们没饭吃了";个别运管人员甚至指责"为了多捞钱,引狼入室";部分驾驶员甚至打着"我们要饭吃"横幅,开车游行,一直闹到交通局.     

Insights on disruptions as opportunities for transport policy change

Policy change is characterised as being slow and incremental over long time periods. In discussing a radical shift to a low carbon economy, many researchers identify a need for a more significant and rapid change to transport policy and travel patterns. However, it is not clear what is meant by rapid policy change and what conditions might be needed to support its delivery.Our contention in this paper is that notions of habit and stability dominate thinking about transport trends and the policy responses to them. We limit variability in our data collection and seek to design policies and transport systems that broadly support the continuation of existing practices. This framing of the policy context limits the scale of change deemed plausible and the scope of activities and actions that could be used to effect it.This paper identifies evidence from two sources to support the contention that more radical policy change is possible. First, there is a substantial and on-going churn in household travel behaviour which, harnessed properly over the medium term, could provide the raw material for steering behaviour change. Secondly, there is a growing evidence base analysing significant events at local, regional and national level which highlight how travellers can adapt to major change to network conditions, service availability and social norms. Taken together, we contend that the population is far more adaptable to major change than the policy process currently assumes.Disruptions and the responses to them provide a window on the range of adaptations that are possible (and, given that we can actually observe people carrying them out, could be more widely acceptable) given the current configuration of the transport system. In other words, if we conceptualise the system as one in which disruptions are commonplace, then different policy choices become tractable. Policy change itself can also be seen as a positive disruption, which could open up a raft of new opportunities to align policy implementation with the capacity for change. However, when set against the current framing of stability and habit, disruption can also be a major political embarrassment. We conclude that rather than being inherently problematic, disruption are in fact an opportunity through which to construct a different approach to transport policy that might enable rather than frustrate significant, low carbon change.     

A survey of the Swiss public transport system and policy

This paper surveys Swiss public transport structure and policy. The regulatory regime is explained with the division between the two operators working under federal monopoly — the State railways (SBB) and the postbuses (PTT) — and the rest of the system. The rather complicated Swiss subsidy arrangements are described. The federal government's emphasis on introducing cheap public transport fares on environmental grounds through the federal transport measures (BTM) and the use of cheap fares in urban areas are discussed. The paper notes the Swiss people's rejection by a referendum of a federal commission's proposal for an integrated transport policy, though some of the solutions were introduced in their own right: the division of SBB into two parts, and the creation of the concept Rail 2000, later developed into Rail + Bus 2000. Finally, the paper reviews problems of the Swiss policy, including the future of cheap fares, making some comparisons with developments in Scandinavia.     

Financing congressional earmarks: Implications for transport policy and planning

This research documents the primary strategies used by the US Congress to fund transportation earmarks from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s. It draws on careful analysis of funding bills and primary and secondary sources including government reports, industry and policy newsletters, scholarly articles, and publicly available data on earmarks. It is also informed by interviews with transportation stakeholders involved with earmarks at federal, state, and regional levels. By detailing how Congress pays for earmarks, I show that earmarks do more to redistribute than add to existing transportation resources, and that the intricacy of Congressional funding maneuvers can make earmarks’ fiscal impacts hard to discern. Several implications follow for transportation policy and practice. First, critiques that earmarks increase federal transportation spending are misplaced. While such claims make it easy to discredit national investment in transportation, skepticism is in order when earmarks are invoked to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Second, earmarks’ true costs are related not to increased deficits but rather to opportunity costs incurred when unplanned earmarks replace other investments, particularly projects identified through regional and state planning or competitive selection by an executive agency. Finally, this work suggests productive directions for future earmark reform, such as limiting earmarks to projects in regional or state plans and making explicit for any earmarks in a bill the funding mechanisms that support them. Such steps could lessen the opportunity costs (and administrative inefficiencies) of earmarks, increase transparency in earmarking, and potentially make the practice less objectionable if used to facilitate passage of the long overdue surface transportation authorization bill.     

Partial productivity measures and total factor productivity in the air transport industry: Limitations and uses

In recent years the measurement of productivity has increasingly focused on measuring total factor productivity or TFP. Additional research has investigated the reasons for differences in TFP between firms. The implicit assumption behind this work is that simpler measures of industry productivity (such as revenue ton-miles per employee) can seriously misstate both the level and growth rate of productivity. As a result, accurate analysis of productivity requires information on TFP. While this argument is not open to debate on a theoretical basis, the extent that simple measures of productivity inaccurately portray TFP has not been investigated in anything but a cursory manner. This paper investigates the relationship between typical industry measures of productivity and TFP using a data set of U.S. and non-U.S. airlines for the period 1970–1983. The paper examines both levels of productivity and growth rates. The results indicate the extent to which industry measures accurately or inaccurately reflect the more comprehensive measure of productivity (TFP). To the extent that industry measures are inaccurate, this paper investigates the possible sources of error in order to determine if slightly altered industry measures might more accurately reflect TFP.     

Use of ecological footprinting to explore alternative transport policy scenarios in an Irish city-region

The objective of this paper is to compare the ecological footprint for travel-commuting patterns for the residents of an Irish city-region, that is Limerick city-region, in 1996 and 2002. Scenario building, based on ecological footprint analysis, is used to estimate the impact of different policy choices for 2010. The optimal policy mix for sustainable travel is proposed and consists of a mix of reduced demand through travel demand measures, better spatial planning and technological improvements in fuel economy.     

Assessment of a transport policy potential for intermodal mode shift on a European scale

Policies of general nature for improving the competitive position of intermodal transport have not always been successful. On the contrary, specific policies, such as targeting the supply chain or the offered services and transport are probably more effective in identifying and subsequently shifting transport from road to intermodal. The aim of the paper is the development of a methodology with the necessary tools to assess the potential of a specific policy measure to produce a modal shift in favour of intermodal transport. In addition, for the cases of positive outcomes, the necessary elements for the policy action plan are presented. The methodology comprises of three parts: a toolbox called the macro-scan, which assesses the potential for modal shift, a sensitivity analysis and the policy action plan. Thus, an insight on the impact of a modal shift on supply chains and on the potential for modal shift is acquired. The methodology, developed within the SPIN Research Project of the European Commission, will be useful to policy makers at governmental level as well as to the private sector, especially in the European Union countries.     

An analysis of soft transport policy measures implemented in Sweden to reduce private car use

Evaluations carried out in many countries show that soft policy measures in the form of personalized travel planning reduce private car use and increase travel by public transport. Sweden is a sparsely populated country that poorly supports public transport, a country with long distances, a cold climate, and a high concentration of private cars, which is why soft policy measures implemented in Sweden may be less cost-effective than has been found in other countries. Thirty-two programs using personalized travel planning were analysed with regard to stewardship, geographic area of application, choice of techniques of exerting an influence, and effects on car use and choice of alternative travel modes. None of the evaluations of the documented programs met the method requirements for such evaluations as regards design and effect measurement. Additionally, reporting was substandard as well as non-standard in the way that is desirable in order to enable comparative analyses. With reservations for these shortcomings, it is inferred that positive effects on a par with the results in other countries have been obtained in some of the implemented programs. It is however necessary to conduct evaluations which are of higher quality. The requirements which will then have to be applied are defined.     

Accessibility appraisal of land-use/transport policy strategies: More than just adding up travel-time savings

We examine the accessibility benefits associated with some land-use policy strategies for the Netherlands that anticipate on expected climate change. A disaggregate logsum accessibility measure using the Dutch national land-use/transport interaction model TIGRIS XL is used to compute changes in consumer surplus. The measure provides an elegant and convenient solution to measure the full accessibility benefits from land-use and/or transport policies, when discrete choice travel-demand models are available that already produce logsums. It accounts for both changes in generalised transport costs and changes in destination utility, and is thus capable of providing the accessibility benefits from changes in the distribution of activities, due to transport or land-use policies. The case study shows that logsum accessibility benefits from land-use policy strategies can be quite large compared to investment programmes for road and public transport infrastructure, largely due to changes in trip production and destination utility, which are not measured in the standard rule-of-half benefit measure.     

Income-contingent user preferences in policy evaluation: application and discussion based on multi-agent transport simulations

Standard economic policy evaluation allows the realization of projects if the aggregated economic benefit outweighs their costs. The use of one single aggregated welfare measure for evaluating and ranking projects has often been criticized for many reasons. A major issue is that differentiated effects on individuals or subgroups of the population are not taken into consideration. This leads to the need for transport planning tools that provide additional information for politicians and decision makers. The microscopic multi-agent simulation approach presented in this paper is capable of helping to design better solutions in such situations. In particular, it is shown that the inclusion of individual income in utility calculations allows a better understanding of problems linked to public acceptance. First, individual income-contingent utility functions are estimated based on survey data in order to describe human mobility behavior. Subsequently, using the MATSim framework, the implementation is tested in a test scenario. Furthermore, and going beyond Franklin (2006), it is shown that the approach works in a large-scale real world example. Based on a hypothetical speed increase of public transit, effects on the welfare distribution of the population are discussed. It is shown that the identification of winners and losers seems to be quite robust. However, results indicate that a conversion or aggregation of individual utility changes for welfare analysis is highly dependent on the functional form of the utility functions as well as on the choice of the aggregation procedure.     

Regulation of the informal transport sector in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil: welfare impacts and policy analysis

In Brazil, the explosion of informal transport activity during the past decade has had profound effects on formal public transport systems and is a source of great controversy in the urban transportation sector. A variety of policies have been proposed to manage the growth of the sector. This study seeks to understand how proposed policies will impact the users of these systems. A corridor in Rio de Janeiro with substantial informal activity was used as a case study. Measures of welfare changes in a discrete choice framework were used to estimate proposed policies’ impacts on users. Eleven candidate policies were evaluated, ranging from the eradication of the informal modes and investment in formal modes, to the legalization of the informal modes. Benefits were compared with costs and the distribution of benefits across income classes was explored. Net benefits from some policies were found to be substantial. Legalizing the informal sector was found to benefit users slightly but further investments in the sector are probably inefficient. Users benefited most from improvements in formal mass transit modes, at roughly 100–200 dollars per commuter per year. Finally, policies to foster a competitive environment for the delivery of both informal and formal services were shown to benefit users about 100 dollars per commuter per year. Together, the regulation of the informal sector and investments in the formal sector serve to reinforce the movement towards competitive concessions for services and help reduce the impacts of cartelization and costly in-road competition.

国内外公路运输场站绿色低碳发展政策和技术应用现状分析

通过文献调研,采用纵向比较的方法,文章分析了我国与美国、欧盟、日本等发达国家及地区公路运输场站绿色低碳的发展政策和技术应用现状,并针对我国公路运输场站发展实际,提出了今后公路运输场站绿色低碳发展的几点建议。     

Using value of statistical life for the ex ante evaluation of transport policy options: a discussion based on ethical theory

This paper aims to discuss a number of questions that are highly important for the ex ante evaluation of the safety impacts of transport policy options, from the perspective of ethical theory: (1) Is it morally OK to express prevention on acceptance of fatalities or risks in monetary terms? (2) How useful is the concept of the value of a statistical life (VOSL) for ex ante evaluations of transport policy options? (3) What are the pros and cons of pricing protection of lives or prevention of risks in ex ante evaluations? (4) Which methods are available for expressing (protection of) human lives in monetary terms, and what are the main related methodological discussions? (5) Are all safety-related costs generally included in ex ante evaluations of the safety impacts of transport policy options, and if not: what is the relevance of excluded costs categories from an ethical perspective? (6) How important is the distribution of safety effects from an ethical perspective? The answer to the first question highly depends on the ethical theory that is used. With respect to question 2 we think that the VOSL is a useful concept, but that its application is not straightforward, for several reasons. Thirdly we think that probably pricing safety improves the quality of decision making, but to the best of our knowledge there is no research to underpin this expectation. The answer to question 4 is that several methods exist to estimate the value of a statistical life (VOSL), willingness-to-pay (WTP) methods being the most common category of methods. However, several methodological issues arise that make estimates of VOSL less straightforward. With respect to question 5 we conclude that behaviour-related avoidance costs are often overlooked and that these costs are relevant from an ethical perspective because the freedom to move and the freedom to participate in activities are challenged. Finally the answer to question 6 is that from an ethical perspective, in terms of the evaluation of policy measures, it might matter which groups of the population are the victims of the transport system, or are at risk. Egalitarian theories as well as sufficientarianism are useful theories to discuss distribution effects. Different theories conclude differently.     

Transport policy scenario-building

Long-term planning decisions must be as robust as possible to withstand such changes in the policy-making environment. This calls for a new approach for identifying how policies might fare under different types of conditions and for identifying robust no-regrets strategies. This paper outlines a systematic and logical framework for the development of policy scenarios and shows how scenarios can be used in the analysis of future policy options. The article discusses how scenario analysis can be used to identify, anticipate and assess policy options for the future in an environment of uncertainty, mainly using examples of transport policy in Europe.     

"城乡客运",在"客运"与"公交"之间游走?

从我国国情出发,道路客运与旅游包车属于"道路运输"范畴,而公交与出租则位于"城市公交"之列."道路运输"属于"交通运输业",体制上归属于交通系统管理,而"城市公交"则又属于"社会服务业",归建设系统管理……如此叠加性质的区分说明,估计足以让许多外行人士云里雾里.所以,时至今日,仍然有许多人在发问:城乡客运到底属于哪个行业?     

Optimal transit subsidy policy

The basic justification for transit subsidy is that such a subsidy is necessary, given substantial economies of scale, in order to permit fares to be set at a level which will result in reasonably efficient use of the service. Efficiency is not, however, merely a matter of the level of the fares but even more of the fare structure and pattern. Major changes in fare patterns are needed to permit reasonable efficiency of utilization to be attained, and full advantage derived from subsidy. Differentiation according to time and direction, as well as the distance of travel, is required. Ideally, competing modes such as the private automobile should be priced at marginal cost, differentially by time and place, and the subsidy should be derived from taxes on land values in the areas where such values are enhanced by the presence of transit service at low fares. In the absence of such conditions, fares should differ from marginal cost in ways that take into account the impacts of transit fare variations on auto traffic and congestion, and on the subsidy requirements and the adverse impacts of the taxes imposed to finance the subsidy.In addition to these economic efficiency considerations there may be added considerations of distributional impact and political acceptability, which may modify the optimal solution somewhat but should not greatly change the main outlines of the patterns to be recommended.